Foreign Affairs Committee on April 4th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we turn to our briefing on the situation in Mali.

I want to thank our witnesses for being here today. We have George Saibel, who is with CIDA and is the regional director general for west and central Africa. Mr. Saibel, welcome. Thank you for being here today.

From the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade we have Patricia Malikail, who is the director general of the Africa Bureau, and Renata Wielgosz, the director of west and central Africa relations.

I believe we have two statements this afternoon.

Patricia, we'll start with you.

[Patricia Malikail, Director General, Africa Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade]

We just have one statement.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Is it just one statement? That's perfect. We'll let you go ahead; you're no strangers to committees. We'll have a chance to ask a few questions afterward.

Just to let the committee know, we're going to have bells at 5:15, so we're going to wrap up some time around then.

Thank you.

[Patricia Malikail]

Members of the committee, Mr. Chair, thank you.

Thank you for inviting us to appear before you this afternoon.

Along with my colleagues from DFAIT and CIDA, we will be providing you today with a brief overview of the very worrisome situation in Mali following the coup which took place in this west African country last March 21, and of the position taken by Canada in this regard.

The coup in Mali is a major setback to the country's development plans and has seriously damaged its territorial integrity. This is a serious blow to a country that shared Canadian values on democracy, human rights, and good governance.

There are 22 Canadian companies that operate in Mali, and Canada has provided support, including two military instructors, to L'École de Maintien de la Paix in Bamako.

On March 21, 2012, a coup undertaken by junior officers of the Malian armed forces brought an end to two decades of democratic government. Calling themselves the National Committee for Re-establishment of Democracy and the Restoration of the State, the junta led by Captain Sanogo deposed President Amadou Toumani Touré, usually referred to as ATT.

The dissatisfaction within the junior ranks of the armed forces initially expressed itself through demands to the Malian government for better pay and better weapons. However, these demands quickly shifted to simply deposing President ATT and the members of his government. This coup took place despite the fact that presidential elections, in which ATT was not a candidate, were scheduled to take place next April 29—25 days from now—to elect his successor.

President ATT was able to escape and was not taken prisoner; he is in hiding somewhere in the region of Bamako. However, several personalities, including ministers, remain in detention, despite insistent calls from governments in the region that they be set free.

There's been an urgency in returning Mali to civilian rule given the activities of an alliance of Tuareg fighters, the Mouvement National de libération de L'Azawad, the salafiste movement Ançar Dine, the Mouvement pour l'unicité et le jihad en Afrique de l'Ouest, Mujao, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. These groups have taken key cities in northern Mali--Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu--virtually cutting off half of the country. This is unprecedented in the history of an independent Mali.

We're also starting to hear reports of the imposition of measures that reflect a more strict form of Islam and of sharia law. The conflict in the north has aggravated an already serious humanitarian emergency due to drought across the Sahel. The United Nations estimates that over 200,000 persons have fled since the start of the year, many to neighbouring countries. According to the UNHCR, more than 23,000 have found shelter in Burkina Faso, 46,000 are in Mauritania, and a further 25,000 are being hosted in Niger, together with nearly 2,000 Niger nationals who had been living in Mali for decades. More than 93,000 are believed to be displaced internally in Mali.

Canada reacted quickly and strongly to condemn the coup and to demand the return to constitutional rule. On March 21, as soon as the first news of the coup was received, our Foreign Minister, the Honourable John Baird, expressed his deep concern with respect to the attacks by members of some elements of the armed forces on the presidential palace. He called on the perpetrators of these attacks to immediately withdraw and to respect democracy. He insisted that differences must be resolved by dialogue and democratic process, and not by force, in order to restore security and stability.

On March 24, 2012, Canada announced the immediate suspension of aid programs involving direct payments to the Government of Mali. However, CIDA programs that deliver humanitarian assistance directly to the people of Mali, delivered through international and local non-governmental organizations, will continue. A number of countries, such as the U.S., France, and Germany, have taken similar measures.

On March 30, 2012, Minister Baird and the Honourable Bernard Valcourt (Minister of State (Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency) (La Francophonie)), announced that Canada played an active role in getting Mali suspended from the International Organization of La Francophonie. They indicated that those responsible for the coup must understand that democracy, constitutional order and stability must be re-established.

Canada has also offered assistance to ECOWAS, the 15-member Economic Community of West African States. Leaders of ECOWAS acted immediately on March 27 to suspend Mali from the organization. The leaders failed to return to constitutional order, a condition imposed by ECOWAS on March 30, and consequently the organization imposed sanctions on April 2. These sanctions include a freeze on Mali's accounts at the Central Bank of West African States and the closure of borders with neighbouring states, except for humanitarian needs.

These measures will have an immediate effect on the ability of the state to function and on the availability of food and fuel, putting severe pressure on coup leaders to hand over power. Companies will be affected by fuel shortages and may have to cease operations.

ECOWAS has also announced that it will put in place a military force of 2,000. The modalities of the deployment of this force will be discussed at a meeting of chiefs of defence staff of ECOWAS countries on Thursday, April 5.

The UN Security Council was meeting yesterday and was considering a statement to be issued today. We don't have the final version of the statement, but we're expecting it later today.

I'm going to stop here in the interests of time. If you wish, I can go into details on the reactions of members of the international community and on advice given by the Government of Canada to Canadians, and of course my colleague George Saibel is here from CIDA to answer questions on humanitarian assistance and on assistance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're going to start with the opposition for seven minutes. Madame Laverdière.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My apologies to all of you for having been late, but that's one of those moments when I had to be in two places at the same time.

I missed the beginning, but I think I was able to read most of your presentations here.

I've heard that ATT, Amadou Toumani Touré, has now been accused of war crimes, treason, or something like that, by the coup leaders. To my knowledge, at least a few years ago, he was a very respected leader in Mali. In fact, he was a hero in Mali.

How is the population reacting to all of that, generally?

[Patricia Malikail]

Thank you for the question.

This news that Captain Sanogo was going to ask that ATT be held accountable for treason just came to us yesterday. I think the view of the international community is that ATT is the democratically elected leader of Mali. He was well respected for many years.

We haven't had direct reports of the reaction of the population, but we don't see it changing from that same assessment.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you.

I haven't been following the situation closely in Mali in the last six months, but very briefly, was he still popular with the population?

[Patricia Malikail]

One of the reasons for the coup, perhaps, is a perception among some levels of the military in Mali that ATT was not empathetic to what was happening to them.

One other reason for the coup was that the Malian army operating in the north felt that it didn't have the equipment and the resources to take on the rebels and the AQIM. When there was, in mid-January, a massacre in a place called Aguelhok of military and police, and ATT continued to put forth his position that a resolution of the difficulties and of the situation with the Tuareg had to be a political resolution, I think the military took offence and didn't feel that his government was being sympathetic to their own situation.

That is where we stand.

We hadn't heard a lot of rumblings of discontent with ATT, because there were going to be elections in the next month, when, if there was discontent, there was a way to resolve the issue. There were going to be elections, and ATT had already announced that he was stepping down, so that there would be a completely new cast of candidates for these presidential elections.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much.

Regarding assistance to Canadians, I understand that advice has been given to Canadians to leave by all necessary means and that families of diplomatic personnel have been asked to leave the country.

I think most Canadians registered on ROCA, the registration of Canadians abroad. That's my understanding. But are there still many Canadians in the country?

[Patricia Malikail]

Thank you for the question.

We know now that about 207 Canadians have actually left since we issued the statements that people should leave the country by commercial means while these are still available.

We know that there are about 250 Canadians in the country. About 148 of these Canadians say that they're staying, and there is always a group who would do that.

We've also taken extraordinary measures to call people up to find out where they are. There are about 101 who have not responded at all to our outreach.

That's where we stand right now. I think we will continue efforts to get Canadians to leave while there are commercial means, but there isn't a huge number left in the country.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you again.

My questions are often very brief. Please don't think I'm being rude. In fact, it's because I want to hear from you more than anything else.

I understand that we have offered help to ECOWAS. ECOWAS seems to be considering military action. What kind of help have we offered to ECOWAS? We want African countries to take matters into their own hands, but often when they want to take matters into their own hands and need help, there have been arguments in the past that they didn't get the help they needed. So my question is twofold. What kind of help are we offering ECOWAS? Also, on a different issue, is ECOWAS really contemplating eventual military action?

[Patricia Malikail]

Thank you again for the question.

We certainly have offered assistance to ECOWAS. We did that last Friday and over the weekend. We've made contact with the head of the commission for ECOWAS, with President Compaoré from Burkina Faso, who is the main negotiator for ECOWAS. Also, this is known to President Ouattara of Côte d'Ivoire.

I think ECOWAS itself is deciding what to do. The situation is very fluid. Everybody's first preference is for a political solution to this crisis, and that means Captain Sanogo stepping down and returning the country to constitutional order. That's the first thing on which everybody is in sync, in terms of what is happening.

We've offered assistance on mediation, and I think we're now also waiting for ECOWAS to decide how it wants to describe its mandate. What are the objectives of what it wants to do in Mali? What is the definition of the mission they're going to have? How will it be mobilized, and what will the composition be?

Once it decides this—it could be as early as tomorrow, when the chiefs of defence staff from ECOWAS are meeting—we'll have a better idea of the kinds of requests they may have for assistance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

That's all the time we have, so we're going to move to the other side of the table.

Mr. Van Kesteren, please; you have seven minutes.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for appearing before us this afternoon.

This is another sad chapter in the history of Africa. In the last discussion we had, we were talking about assistance and how we can move forward with assistance and can basically better the situation in Africa—which has had a generation of failures; I think we all agree with that. It was brought to our attention that there are some areas in the world, and not just Africa, where there seem to be some real battles going on.

Wouldn't you agree that the northern part of Africa—and I think we've seen the very northern part of the Africa, but the sub-Sahara especially—is in a position of turmoil, much of it the result of religious wars going on? Would you agree with that statement?

[Patricia Malikail]

The situation in Mali doesn't really reflect this: that the root of the conflict was religious. We shouldn't be too quick in saying that Mali is a failure. This was a completely unexpected coup after 20 years of democracy. Right next door in Senegal, we had a president who wanted to stay on be booted out in a democratic election.

I think this took the people of Mali, in fact, by surprise. One person said to me: “We feel ashamed. We were in fact very proud of our status as a democracy for 20 years. We cannot believe ourselves that this has happened.”

The roots of this conflict are in fact internal—how the military was feeling. And it's a faction of the military; we don't even think it's the full military that's involved. It had to do with Tuareg rebels and did not necessarily have a religious motivation.

That being said, some of the groups that are going to take advantage of this situation are Salafist jihadists, including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

That's fair, but maybe I could rephrase it somewhat. We give legitimacy to a lot of these groups, but let's face it: they're thugs. They're people who have gained power, and they get it by guns, and they use the religious aspect. The end result is that we have another unstable country.

You mentioned that our minister was quick to cut off aid dollars, though standing behind the people. But Mali has been a focus for CIDA for quite some time. Could you give a brief description of our programs in Mali and a sense of what accomplishments we have contributed? What programs have been suspended as a result of the coup? Can you just tell us what we still will be doing as a government? I know that we suspended a lot of our programs, but what will we continue to do to help the Mali people?

[George Saibel, Regional Director General, West and Central Africa, Canadian International Development Agency]

Thank you very much for the question, Mr. Chair.

Allow me to start by giving you a very brief description of the program as it was at the time of the coup. For Canada, it was a country of focus and, as a matter of fact, the largest recipient in west Africa at the time. It was receiving volumes of assistance in excess of $100 million a year.

It was focused in the areas of children and youth. In that, we were primarily within health and education. We have been in those sectors for some time and have been achieving some considerable results. We have a number of objective measures that can demonstrate concrete, tangible progress that has been realized. Similarly, in education, both with access to schools and the quality of the education received and with more textbooks for young children, these were some of achievements.

On the food security side, we were working in the agriculture area through irrigation, through microcredit, and through the development of markets. Once again, we have a list of some pretty impressive concrete results that have occurred.

Then, with regard to overall governance and oversight, we had a number of programs that were working very well to provide some teeth to the democracy, in the sense that there was excellent oversight. We have a flagship with the Auditor General of Mali, where we're working closing with our Canadian Auditor General. They have become very important in the scheme of things in Mali in terms of providing local oversight to their processes.

So there's a number of significant achievements to point to, and some of these achievements and programs were done directly with the Government of Mali, involving financial transfers to the government. These became the subject of the suspension at the time of the coup, instituted immediately at the time of the coup. This resulted in a significant statement and significant cuts at time of coup. In total, it represented $45.6 million in moneys we withheld that we would have otherwise spent had the coup not occurred. So that's a pretty tangible reaction right there.

In terms of what we're still able to do, in the communiqué issued by Ministers Oda and Baird it was clear that we would suspend financial transfers to the government. I have quantified those already in what I have just said. But in terms of what is continuing, it's support through non-governmental channels, NGOs, international bodies, and humanitarian types of assistance. Where conditions allow, that part of the program is still continuing.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Do I have any more time, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You have one minute.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Very quickly, I just wanted to mention that on Wednesday the UN council condemned the military coup in Mali and has called for immediate restoration, so I guess that has happened.

The other thing, I guess, that I wanted to just impress on you is that you see how important it is that we have stability, how important it is that we work with governments, and how important it is that—as we feel on this side, at least—the best thing for a nation, a people, is employment for wealth generation. Would you agree that those countries we've been successful in doing this with are much more stable politically than the poorer countries that seem to...? Is that a fair assessment, do you think?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's all the time we have. A quick response, please, if you have one.

[Patricia Malikail]

I don't think it's possible to generalize exactly in that way. I think we've seen in Mali and actually next door in Burkina Faso governments that recognize that the role of the private sector is very important in terms of development in their countries.

A lot of countries in Africa have very young populations. They know that in order to find jobs for these young people, you will need to have a private sector that's vibrant. So it is a force for development, or it can be.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

Mr. LeBlanc, sir, you have seven minutes

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you very much for your presentations. I had the opportunity to briefly discuss this topic with Mr. Dechert, a few weeks ago. I am very interested in this subject. I have visited Mali a few times. For us in Canada, that was an example of success.

As Mr. Saibel was saying, hundreds of millions of dollars were allocated over time. I am under the impression that we all believed we were successful, that we had implemented institutions that functioned properly.

I have a simple question. Malians were perhaps as surprised as we were, but in a way, the international community's warning system failed. It seems that we and other partners—other countries, other allies of Canada—were lacking information.

I have the sense that there's a bit of a systemic failure. It's not personal to the foreign affairs department or CIDA at all, but the international community, which held up Mali all the time as an example, was caught, I think, in an embarrassing position where this money that we proudly allocated to strengthen democratic institutions, and the Auditor General.... If the Auditor General reports to a bunch of people with machine guns, in a junta, it's not a very effective reporting mechanism.

I'm just wondering what lessons we and other partners are taking from this. How do we make sure that we're not caught in a situation that I think is regrettable? As I say, it's not a blame thing, because the international community, writ large, was caught with this.

How do we make sure that other hundreds of millions of dollars that we're spending...or that other priority countries we've identified aren't suddenly going to wake up one morning with captain whatever as president and a sense that we put taxpayers' dollars into a circumstance that turned out to be unfortunate? I'm just wondering what lessons we're trying to take, writ large, to see if somebody is evaluating other countries to make sure this doesn't happen in other.... Well, I say “make sure this doesn't happen”, but how can we prevent it from happening? Perhaps a better way to say it is that we need to try for a bit of an earlier warning system.